I am running arch on a notebook, but I do not need the wireless connection. Nevertheless the adapter is continuously running, even if it is not necessary. Is it possible to disable it temporarily? And if yes, how?
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2 Answers
Use rfkill:
$ rfkill block all
This will disable all wireless adapters, WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, GPS, whatever your computer has built in. If you only want to disable one specific adapter, find out its ID with
$ rfkill list
0: hci0: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: yes
Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
In this example, the ID of the WiFi chip is 1. Block it with
rfkill block 1
To reenable this interface, use
rfkill unblock 1
To reenable all interfaces use
rfkill unblock all
You can also choose to e.g. only disable all WiFi adapters and leave the rest by replacing all with wifi. Here's the full list of usable types from man rfkill:
block index|type
Disable the device corresponding to the given index. type is one of "all",
"wifi", "wlan", "bluetooth", "uwb", "ultrawideband", "wimax", "wwan", "gps",
"fm" or "nfc".
If you don't have rfkill installed, install it with
# pacman -S rfkill
PS: I have no idea why rfkill works when run as an unprivileged user. On my Mint, it doesn't have a setuid or setgid bit.
Find the device name with the command ip link, set it to down mode with ip link set <device> down. The device is most likely named something like wlp3s0. If operation isn't permitted, perform the command with sudo.
